by Admin on October 28, 2012
Like most things on the Internet, ebook digital publishing evolves very rapidly, and what may be relevant today may not be within a month or two. At the time of writing 
many traditional self publishing companies now offer ebook deals bundled with a print book deal package. However self publishing a print book, can be quite involved, and it is possible to publish an e-book without the print version yourself.
Just like when publishing a book in print, before publishing an ebook you should make sure it is the best it can be. It should be free from spelling mistakes, properly formatted and contain interesting information or a fascinating story.
When publishing any book you will also need to create a cover. You should hire a professional for this if possible because the cover on an ebook is basically the main selling point. It needs to be eye-catching, but should not contain too much detail because it also needs to look good in thumbnail version. If you look around you will see a lot of really bad self-published covers, so make sure you do not make this mistake, as it will be critical in terms of the number of sales you achieve.
Ebooks should be priced cheaply to sell, unless the information you are offering is truly outstanding. As a rough guide $5.99 is the maximum price point, and $0.99 the lowest. Although you will likely sell more copies at $0.99, this will not necessarily earn you a better income, so this is something you will need to consider carefully.
Publishing on Amazon Kindle is a great place to start, but the percentage paid to the publisher is fairly low, starting at just 35% for books priced below $2.99, but going on to a more respectable 70% for all those who set the price point between $2.99 a $9.99. Many Kindle marketplace many authors offer their e-book’s free, as this results in hundreds of downloads and hopefully good feedback. Once they have feedback in place they put a price on the book.
There are many options available to you in regard to where you can sell your book. As previously mentioned you can put it on the Kindle market place, or choose a smaller site like Smashwords.com or Lulu. You can of course offer your book on various platforms at the same time, although you will lose out on the many benefits Amazon offers authors who publish exclusively on Amazon.
by Admin on August 23, 2009
A number of anti-virus vendors are reporting new malware that takes a slightly different approach than the norm.
BitDefender and Kaspersky refer to the virus as Win32.Induc.A.
What is different about this virus is that it compromises systems running the Delphi compiler. Once the compiler itself is compromised all resulting code generated by the compiler is also infected. The virus is relatively simple in that it only wants to propogate, no other payload has been utilized.
A funny side effect is that in the few days since this virus has been detected in the wild, a number of trojans have been discovered to be affected with the virus. Obviously they were compiled with an infected Delphi compiler.
According to the people over at BitDefender the easiest way to detect if your Delphi instance is infected is to check if their compilers’ Lib folder contains a SysConst.bak file (the most obvious sign of infection) and to rename it to SysConst.dcu if it exists, overwriting the compromised file, then recompile their applications.
Special thanks to reader Artyom for pointing us to this story.
Update:
A commenter dusted some cobwebs out of my brain by pointing to a paper I read as a lowly undergrad some 25 years ago. Ken Thompson of Bell Labs fame presented a paper to the Turing Award Lecture entitled Reflections on Trusting Trust. In this paper Mr. Thompson mentions the concept of compromising the Unix login binary by first infecting the compiler.
– Rick Wanner – rwanner at isc dot sans dot org
by Admin on August 23, 2009
A new version of Thunderbird, version 2.0.0.23, is available. Thus update fixes MFSA 2009-42 (Compromise of SSL-protected communication).
If you are a Thunderbird user, it is probably best to apply this update as soon as convenient.
Update:
It appears this update, which affects multiple Mozilla products, has changed the rules for security certificates generated with wildcards. More information is available at the Fourmilab Blog.
– Rick Wanner – rwanner at isc dot sans dot org
by Admin on August 23, 2009
Amid all of the rumors of Yahoo buying eSpotting, FindWhat slips though the cracks and aquires the company. FindWhat.com, an Internet search engine operator, said on Wednesday that it is buying privately-owned Espotting Media Inc. for $163 million to create an Internet marketing company.
by Admin on August 23, 2009
Google has just introduced a new advertising program which lets smaller web sites run Google advertisements on their sites and get paid per click by Google.
This is an expansion of their AdWords program which added Contextual
AdWords earlier in the year.
To apply online for the program, website publishers can visit www.google.com/adsense. Google’s editorial team will review each publisher application to ensure that the site meets editorial guidelines. To activate the service, the publisher logs into their account and cuts and pastes a small piece of HTML into their web pages or ad server.
by Admin on August 21, 2009